Vim allows you to run commands from the command line using the + or -c flags, vim +PlugUpdate or vim -c ":PlugUpdate". Many plugin commands aren’t available until you have opened a buffer (eg. rails.vim or git.vim). This has bugged me for a while and I finally figured out how to make it work.

Trying to run such commands from the command line will raise a Vim error. For example vim -c ":Emodel user" raises E492: Not an editor command: :Emodel user. A trick I found is that Vim’s -s flag (Read Normal mode commands from file) runs after the first buffer is loaded and these commands are available.

Instead of using an actual file, Bash/ZSH’s process substitution can be used:

# Launch vim and run `:Emodel user`
$ vim -s <(echo ":Emodel user")

# Launch vim and run `:Gstatus`
$ vim -s <(echo ":Gstatus")

Using this you could easily write scripts/shell functions to start Vim with commonly used commands:

emodel() {
  vim -s <(echo ":Emodel $@")
}

emigration() {
  vim -s <(echo ":Emigration $@")
}

I’m not sure how useful I’ll find this now that I know how to do it, but I’m glad to have figured it out.